5 Factors That Can Make Or Break Your Marketing Strategy

Arguably, one of the most important aspects of growing your business is your marketing strategy. With an effective marketing plan in place, you’ll be able to flesh out such things as potential new growth opportunities, who your actual customers are versus who you thought they were, how to acquire more customers, and where best to spend future marketing dollars.

Companies that fail to create a marketing strategy are destined to either fail or struggle indefinitely. However, just because you create a strategy does not guarantee success.

Here are five factors that can make or break your marketing strategy.

1. Your Understanding Of Your Target Market

Every marketing strategy has a target market that you want to reach. Even if you’re not certain who you should target, start by inputting information that you do know. Figuring out the demographics of your target audience is a great place to start. Once you nail down the demographics, you’ll want to create a buyer’s persona.

The buyer’s persona is the secret weapon used by successful marketing companies. The buyer’s persona includes information such things as age, gender, and income. Depending on your needs, it can include details like what they enjoy eating, how many kids they have, or even what sports teams they cheer for.

The point is, you need to understand your target market, so you know where you can target them, how they behave, and what kind of interests they have. If you don’t understand your target market you can’t possibly expect to reach them. For a company like Rpay, the buyer persona was one of the essential first steps in creating the marketing strategy. “We knew we had an awesome product that simplified the payment process, so it was a natural action to build out that buyer persona from a person who needs to buy or sell online,” explains CEO Anagha Agrawal.

2. Communicating The Value To Your Customers

The most impressive marketing strategies in the world won’t work unless you communicate the value of your product or service to your customers. You need to clearly communicate exactly what your product offers. If they can purchase a similar good or service elsewhere, you need to communicate what makes yours different—and better—than your competition. For example, VaultBank is a copmany that aims to make investing easier and more accessible to everyone.

VaultBank didn’t invent their model, but it made it better. As Managing Director, Christopher Cummock puts it, “Our platform far outweighs the old, clunky ways of investing, and we’ve never been shy about advertising the uniqueness of our product to current and potential customers. In this competitive business, marketing is more about effective communication than anything else.”

3. Watching The Data

In these days of Google Analytics, a free marketing data tool, there’s no excuse for not keeping a close eye on the data. With the availability of marketing data, companies can track which web pages are generating the most clicks, how long visitors are staying on pages, where site visitors are coming from, and much, much more. Failure to spend the time needed to watch data can mean the failure of the entire marketing strategy.

Just ask Zhixian Yan, of Echolink. As a PhD and computer science guru, Yan knows all too well the value of computer data in forensic customer habits investigation, as well as highlighting areas where future marketing money should be spent.

4. Focus

The best companies out there focus on helping customers, not on making money. It isn’t an intuitive idea, the thought of putting customers ahead of profits, but it works. “As soon as your company starts focusing on giving value to customers, there is an almost organic growth that occurs that is almost inexplicable,” says the founder of Marine-Chain.

The practice of placing more value on money rather than the human component sabotages any kind of effort you make to grow your business. Good businesses don’t just work that way. To achieve this kind of focus, be sure to include your marketing team on meetings about R&D and find other ways your company can add value to people’s lives. This will help remind your marketing team of the real mission of the business.

5. Passion

Never underestimate the power of passion in any business venture. If you care—or don’t care—about a project, it will show in the final product. Whether you’re selling a hair care product or bananas, you need to be passionate about your company, your product or service, and your marketing strategy. Business is a long-term investment you need to find a strong motivator at the beginning. If you don’t have passion at the outset, you’ll never be able to keep it going in the long run.

Eventually, your lack of enthusiasm will manifest itself, whether in the quality of the product, the lack of direction in your marketing campaign, or in the way you handle customer interactions on social media and online forums. Simply stated, people can tell when a company doesn’t care about it’s customers, and eventually, they will stop caring, too.

If you’ve lost passion for your business or marketing strategy, consider changing it up in a way that generates renewed interest. This may mean adding a new product line, altering how you interact with customers, or even moving your marketing business to a new agency.

Of course, the first step in ensuring the success of your marketing strategy is to have a good plan set in place to begin with. Get your marketing wheels in motion by implementing these ideas today.